Canadian Practice and Recommendations on Functional MRI to Lateralize Language in Epilepsy.

Background/objective: Identifying a patient's dominant language hemisphere is an important evaluation performed prior to epilepsy surgery and is commonly assessed using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). However, the lack of standardization and resultant heterogeneity of fMRI paradigms used in clinical practice limits the ability of cross-center comparisons to be made regarding language laterality results.

Methods: Through surveying Canadian Epilepsy Centres in combination with reviewing supporting literature, current fMRI language lateralization practices for the clinical evaluation of patients with epilepsy were assessed.

Distinctive biophysical features of human cell-types: insights from studies of neurosurgically resected brain tissue.

Electrophysiological characterization of live human tissue from epilepsy patients has been performed for many decades. Although initially these studies sought to understand the biophysical and synaptic changes associated with human epilepsy, recently, it has become the mainstay for exploring the distinctive biophysical and synaptic features of human cell-types. Both epochs of these human cellular electrophysiological explorations have faced criticism.